Don't really know what apple is up to, but watch the 4 hours on the London Stock Exchange before NASDAQ early hours opens and if it's happy buy a lot of ARMH.
Apple to acquire ARM?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#22I don't believe Apple is dumb enough to buy ARM as part of a grand anti-competitive scheme. Even if that was their intent it wouldn't work legally or technically. If Apple wants to expand their chip designs for their own use, or to sell OEM, they don't need to buy ARM. An ARM license will do and it costs considerably less than $8B. That leads me to believe Apple wants someone to think they're interested in ARM. Kind of makes me think about the AdMob deal and how strange it was Apple just let the clock run out on that deal, quickly turns around and buys another company, and has a unique platform on the market <6 months later. Just makes you wonder if they ever had any real interest in AdMob or just wanted to force Google's hand on it.
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#23This would scream antitrust. ARM chips represent something like 90% of all CPUs in existence; billions of cores manufactures every year by different fabs. I'm not sure it would be allowed to go through.
1) ARM doesn't manufacture any chips. They licence their designs to chip makers. That means they are in the chip design market, and there is no way they have a monopoly there, so I find it extremely unlikely that the takeover would be blocked on those grounds. 2) Antitrust problems generally happen when you coerce a company into something using your monopoly power - not when you close down a business (if you believe…
> Antitrust problems generally happen when you coerce a company into something using your monopoly power
So Microsoft buying Intel wouldn't generate antitrust problems?
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) ARM doesn't manufacture any chips. They licence their designs to chip makers. That means they are in the chip design market, and there is no way they have a monopoly there, so I find it extremely unlikely that the takeover would be blocked on those grounds. 2) Antitrust problems generally happen when you coerce a company into something using your monopoly power - not when you close down a business (if you believe…
> Antitrust problems generally happen when you coerce a company into something using your monopoly power So Microsoft buying Intel wouldn't generate antitrust problems?
Microsoft is a special case because of their previous antitrust problems. I'm sure it would be investigated, and with a merger of companies that big I suspect lobbying and politics will have as much effect as the law itself.
But at a very superficial level: MS & Intel are in different markets, so there is no obvious objection.
IANAL etc etc
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#25That'd be a disaster. ARM is running pretty much in everything portable. I don't want to see that in Steves hands!
Ironically, if the worst happens (Apple buying ARM, shutting down licensing), Android would become even more the competition as it is already running on Atom and quite portable to other architectures. Intel would lose a major competitor, too.
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#26Buying ARM to stop its cores getting to competitors doesn't seem a good idea. Other chip manufacturers would rush to fill that vacuum. Freescale and the other Power ISA guys would love that kind of boost. I don't see it slowing down Android significantly. GCC will recompile to whatever other platform is chosen; there will be some porting effort but it isn't huge.
If Apple is really doing this I see it a play to take on Intel. The ARM instruction set is clean and well-designed, unlike Intel's. This enables ARM chips to draw significantly less power for the same performance. Now, who cares about performance-per-Watt? Anyone who has a cluster does. Anyone building devices that run on a battery does. These two groups are becoming everyone -- it's laptops/tablets and cloud computing all the way, baby. If ARM gets a 64-bit implementation and a fast floating point unit it can compete against Intel in the server market. Apple can fund that with their giant pile of cash. ARM already has the low end market sewn up. Imagine a laptop with 10 hours battery life and Google buying a million 64-bit ARM cores. That's two nice revenue streams to have, and it gets Apple into a big market where they currently have very little presence.
I did a blog post about some of these issues here: http://www.untyped.com/untyping/2010/02/02/is-the-ipad-the-b...
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#27Buying ARM to stop its cores getting to competitors doesn't seem a good idea. Other chip manufacturers would rush to fill that vacuum. Freescale and the other Power ISA guys would love that kind of boost. I don't see it slowing down Android significantly. GCC will recompile to whatever other platform is chosen; there will be some porting effort but it isn't huge. If Apple is really doing this I see it a play to take…
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Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#28> they could stop ARM's technology from ending up in everyone else's computers and gadgets I really hope the acquisition won't get through, I can see Apple doing just that.
Of course, Apple used to own a sizeable chunk of ARM.
But it doesn't make sense - Apple can't stop the existing licensees from stopping producing their chips, and the companies with architecture licenses will still be able to make new, compatible designs to sell to third parties. What it might do is stop innovation in the ARM ISA being made available to other companies, but that's a very long term thing; a new ISA takes many years to get to product silicon.
The whole ARM business model is based around sharing the costs of development (which are substantial) with a large group of companies. Could Apple really justify sustaining that cost to prevent competitors from using future ARM designs, when there are (albeit perhaps inferior) alternatives?
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#29This would scream antitrust. ARM chips represent something like 90% of all CPUs in existence; billions of cores manufactures every year by different fabs. I'm not sure it would be allowed to go through.
1) ARM doesn't manufacture any chips. They licence their designs to chip makers. That means they are in the chip design market, and there is no way they have a monopoly there, so I find it extremely unlikely that the takeover would be blocked on those grounds. 2) Antitrust problems generally happen when you coerce a company into something using your monopoly power - not when you close down a business (if you believe…
They don't have to 'force' it, they just have to make it very expensive.
ARM has a three-tier licensing model (" rel="nofollow">http://www.arm.com/products/buying-guide/licensing/index.php...)
If you believe the wikipedia entry on ARM licensing costs, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARM_licensees), then the average cost (in 2006) was $0.11 per core, averaged across all cores.
At at 50M iPhones, thats $5.5M (USD). Even if Apple is paying $2/core in licensing costs (effective, the A4 is the first non-Samsung part used by iPhone OS), thats still $100M, so $8B doesn't pencil out.
I do find it incredibly likely though that Apple would 'buy out' their license(s), and negotiate to have a minimal (maybe even zero) cost license to all future ARM IP.
Or they could just buy a controlling interest (probably wouldn't take 51%) and frighten off everyone who competes with Apple.
Just the slow-down for the rest of the market alone (Atom isn't anywhere close to ARM in terms of functionality/watt), it might be worth it.
Re: Apple to acquire ARM?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) ARM doesn't manufacture any chips. They licence their designs to chip makers. That means they are in the chip design market, and there is no way they have a monopoly there, so I find it extremely unlikely that the takeover would be blocked on those grounds. 2) Antitrust problems generally happen when you coerce a company into something using your monopoly power - not when you close down a business (if you believe…
They don't have to 'force' it, they just have to make it very expensive. ARM has a three-tier licensing model ( " rel="nofollow">http://www.arm.com/products/buying-guide/licensing/index.php... ) If you believe the wikipedia entry on ARM licensing costs, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARM_licensees ), then the average cost (in 2006) was $0.11 per core, averaged across all cores. At at 50M iPhones, tha…
I don't disagree with your point, except this:
Just the slow-down for the rest of the market alone (Atom isn't anywhere close to ARM in terms of functionality/watt), it might be worth it.
ARM licencees already have next-gen (Cortex-A9; ie: Tegra-2 etc) chips coming this year. Any slow down in new designs from ARM won't effect the market for a couple of years as these chips are much faster than the current designs (Cortex-A8; ie: Snapdragon, TI OMAP 3000, Apple A4)